Richard Bartle

Dread>Gah! Bartle again...he's another Garriot...except Garriot has done a few things since 1978.....

I don't know if you spotted, but this piece is called "The Game Archaeologist". It's not about people who have done things since 1978, it's about people who did things in 1978...

Richard

Cavadus>If it only took me a week or two to get back up to speed it wouldn't bother me at all.

As a rule of thumb, the length of time it used to take to get back to where you were when you died in MUD1 was roughly half the time it took you the last time. You also tended to get better at avoiding being killed, so that by the time you got to the second-highest level other players were more afraid of you than you were of them.

We're not going to see permadeath return, though, so this is merely an academic discussion these days.

Richard

From www.dictionary.com:

leg·end /ˈlɛdʒənd/ –noun
1. a nonhistorical or unverifiable story handed down by tradition from earlier times and popularly accepted as historical.
...
7. a person who is the center of such stories: "She became a legend in her own lifetime."

I co-wrote MUD in 1978, nearly two decades before UO appeared. You don't care about that any more than the 20-years-from-now equivalents of you will care about Richard Garriott. That's kinda the point of legends, isn't it?

Richard

Well there are always text MUDs...

Richard

>Its amazingly cool to see Richard Bartle posting here on Massively.

Oh, I'm just grateful to be able to post some place where the people have actually read what they're commenting on.

I think maybe you need to re-examine what you mean by "cool", though!

Richard

Just to clarify, I wasn't talking about different kinds of MMO player, I was talking about different kinds of MMO. There are basically three stable kinds of MMO that people play for fun: achiever-heavy (Dorothy worlds); socialiser-heavy (Wendy worlds) and balanced (Alice worlds). If people aren't playing for fun (eg. it's a corporate world used for training) then this doesn't apply. You can get achievers in Wendy worlds, and you can get socialisers in Dorothy worlds, you just get them in different proportions.

Originally, we just had Alice worlds. However, following the schism between socialisers and achievers that was wrought with the creation of TinyMUD, we wound up with Dorothy and Wendy worlds, with Alice sidelined. In philosophical terms, we had a dialectic: designers in the Dorothy and Wendy camps were keen to assert their difference from the other, and from their shared past. This was reflected in their designs, and became established as part of the paradigm; it has been carried forward to the present without much modification.

However, because of these origins and the rapid establishment of the standard way to do things (DikuMUD gameplay, in Dorothy's case), the paradigms are a little too doctrinaire: if you have DikuMUD gameplay at the start, you have it all the way through. You don't actually need to do this, and I'd say you probably shouldn't want to; end-game players sense there's something overly-paternalistic about it. They would be more suited to the Alice style of play than the Dorothy style - but new players are very heavily in favour of Dorothy over Alice. Hence, my entirely obvious suggestion was to start off as a Dorothy game and then graduate to an Alice game. The two are compatible.

What the slides don't say, probably because I was so caught up in my metaphor to notice, is that Wendy can play with Dorothy. It emerged from the discussion after the talk that a number of developers present were building Dorothy games with a Wendy component to their endgame (typically embodied as housing). I'd thought that if you mushed Wendy and Dorothy together you'd end up with Dorothy sub-worlds in Wendy worlds. Now although this happened in LambdaMOO and happens in Second Life (quite successfully in some cases), it's only one possibility. I'd neglected the possibility that you could build self-contained "Wendy houses" in Dorothy worlds. I have an ability to miss the obvious, too...

So, something people could try is Dorothy to start with, Alice at the end, and Wendy embedded along the way.

Oh, and the "How things were doesn't mean that's how things should be" line is saying that we shouldn't blindly follow the past. There is wisdom there, but there's wisdom in the present, too. I'm not calling for us all to play Alice games, I'm calling for Alice and Dorothy (and Wendy if you like) to play together. The Alice games have their own problems, notably that the complexity they need in order to sustain their emergent gameplay is very rough on newbies. Dorothy is very good in this area, though - yet is weak in precisely the area where Alice is strong.

Richard

Pip>What is your opinion on the quests that ask you to essentially murder X amounts of people to get a new shiny weapon to help you murder more people in the next line of quests?

You pretty well know when you sign up for WoW that you'll get these quests - it's a genre convention. If you're uncomfortable with them, you don't play in the first place (or you stop playing pretty damned soon).

You don't know you're going to get out-of-context torture quests, though. You only find that out 4 years after the game launches. That's what I'm complaining about here.

If you're asking me about my personal morality, that's not the issue here. The issue is whether the fiction you signed up to is the fiction you're given. This torture quest isn't part of that fiction, and there's no context to bring it into that fiction. That's what I'm getting at.

Richard

pufonthis>This is great. Every day I stop by here, write some stupid comment about Bartle in some topic I really haven't even read and he replies with a long, heart-felt reply.

Ah, the "I didn't mean it, I was trolling and he fell for it" defence that people use when they lost the argument and want to try save face.

OK, I'll give you the fig leaf you need to cover your embarrassment, and not respond to your further posts...

Richard

pufonthis>Wow, Bartle put me in my place, he told me the button said "decline" and not "cancel". That's some great, jui-jitsu was it?

The ju-jitsu was using your own argument against you. The Cancel/Decline distinction wasn't actually a part of it - I put it in because if I'd said "cancel" then someone would have leapt on my back and started biting my ears for not having said "decline".

>By your logic there would never be any game made ever.

I'd ask you to explain how you came to this conclusion, but I don't think you actually gave it any thought in the first place. Go on, apply it to Tetris, that should be an interesting exercise.

>You find it hard to torture someone, but it's perfectly ok to slaughter people/animals/creatures all day and night.

This is covered by another one of the bullet points in the blog entry I made that you're quite happy to criticise despite not having read it. However, just for you, so you don't have to figure out how to click a hyperlink, here's the relevant paragraph: "I am aware that playing WoW means you get to kill thousands of creatures. I am aware that murder is a worse crime than torture. Murder is a worse crime than anything (other than mass murder). However, previous quests have not exactly asked you to commit murder (at least for the Alliance — I don't know about Horde). It's always been for some morally justifiable purpose (self defence, most of the time). Whether you believe that torture can ever be morally justified or not (personally, I don't), you can't justify it in this particular case. Sticking a pain stick up some prisoner's jacksy to make him talk is uncalled for. Jeez, a simple Eye of Kilrogg will find out all you want to know for you, you didn't even need to capture the prisoner in the first place!"

>I guess you couldn't play a first person shooter cause that would mean you might actually have to shoot someone.

Oh, here's another example where I can simply quote back at you a paragraph from the very blog entry you purport to be criticising but haven't read: "When I signed up to play WoW I knew it had fireballs, so I expected killing. I knew it had rogues, so I expected thieving. I had to wait until the second expansion to find out it had gratuitous torture. This does not fall within the parameters of what I was expecting. It's as if you were reading the new book 8 of the Harry Potter series and Harry turns to drugs and uses his magic powers for sport to blind people. JKR can put that kind of stuff in her books if she likes, freedom of speech being what it is and all, but it's shattered your expectations. I wasn't expecting consequence-free torture quests in WoW. Getting one was a shock."

See? I'm not actually complaining about the content. Why do you think I am?! The more you try to mock me about something I never said, the less credible and more ignorant you appear. It's just extraordinary you'd do that.

>The rest of us know its "just a game" and know that whatever the heck you need to do to some poor pixel person doesn't matter and just advances the game.

So you'd be fine if you'd been asked to conduct anal intercourse with a rabbit instead? Just so we know where you stand (er, presumably behind the rabbit). If your backstop is it's just a game so it doesn't matter, you'd do anything for the points, you wouldn't care. Wear the Nazi armband? Sure, just hand over those XP!

At some point, EVEN YOU would find something so unpleasant that it would cause you to think twice about it. Then, for you, it would no longer be a game. At that point, you may finally understand why "it's just a game" isn't a universally applicable get-out clause.

>The fact that you actually used a real life metaphor to show your dislike of this phrase (burning cars) shows how disconnected you are from the reality of the situation, fake vs real.

No, it shows how disconnected you are. Those people who play MMOs are real. They have real feelings and real emotions, and can't help feeling distress when they get an out-of-context torture quest. You want to impose a fiction on them, "it's just a game", but the fiction broke when the out-of-context thing happened. Those are real people, just like the example you chose to respond to they were real cars. It's not a game any more at this point: there's too much reality involved.

>I see you as someone who must try to cause a fuss over small, insubstantial parts of the game when everyone else just claimed their loot and moved on.

Well, you see me wrongly. If I were going for publicity, why would I post on my own, little-read blog when I was being email-interviewed by a publicist for IMGDC at the time? Or when I could have posted on Terra Nova, which has a much larger readership?

>This smells of you just trying to stir up things to put your name in the headlines again.

Remind me why I would want my name in the headlines again? Just so I know the nature of your misunderstanding of me...

Richard

Bonedead>It must suck to be Bartle, it's like he can never speak his mind without a mob of newbs attacking him.

It wouldn't be so bad if I could AOE...

Richard